Tees Valley Publishers
Smokestack Books
Smokestack aims to keep open a space for what is left of the English radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century. Smokestack champions poets who are unfashionable, radical, left-field and working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack is interested in the World as well as the Word; believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry.
Smokestack's list includes books by Linda France, Katrina Porteous, Georgi Gospodinov, Alison Fell, F.D. Reeve, Kevin Cadwallender, Sebastian Barker, Martín Espada, Francis Combes (France), new Kristin Dimitrova (Bulgaria) and Andras Mezei (Hungary), as well as new editions of radical classics by Heinrich Heine and Nicola Vaptsarov. Coming soon from Smokestack are books by Jeremy Cronin (South Africa), Olga Berggolts (Russia), Richard Schaaf (USA), Gustavo Pereira (Venezuela), and Victor Jara (Chile).
‘Ah-oh, smokestack lightning, shinin' just like gold, Why don't ya hear me cryin'?' Howling Wolf
‘and on every side smokestacks were dancing on rooftops.' Vladimir Mayakovsky
‘The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack...
Type of the modern-emblem of motion and power-pulse of the continent,
For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse.' Walt Whitman
‘Smokestack is doing an excellent job' (Penniless Press)
'Smokestack books is a welcome addition to the poetry publishing world.' (Critical Survey)
‘don't assume that books from left of centre Middlesbrough press Smokestack will be about whippets and Federation ale.' (Sphinx)
‘Smokestack has a great squad of radical poets.' (Adrian Mitchell)
Contact Details:
w: www.smokestack-books.co.uk
t: +44 (0) 1642 813997
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PO Box 408, Middlesbrough, TS5 6WA
LATEST PUBLICATIONS
Francis Combes, Common Cause
ISBN 978-0-9560341-8-2
Price: £12.95
‘Communism,' wrote Brecht, ‘is the simple idea so hard to achieve.' Common Cause tells the hard story of this simple idea, from the Garden of Eden to the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a brave and original history of utopia, revolution, and hope. It is a study in verse of the Communist movement in the twentieth-century, the men and women who led it, like Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Gramsci, as well as some of the artists who marched in their ranks, like Mayakovsky, Picasso and Brecht. Common Cause is a ‘history of the defeated', a book about enthusiasm and illusion, heroes and martyrs, saints and sinners. It is an epic, a tragedy and a manifesto for the utopian imagination.
‘I've never seen another book like it. It's poetry, it's a thesis about history, it's a roll-call of revolutionary martyrs during two or three millennia, it includes many jokes, it's an intimate confession - not of an individual penitent, but of the wounded body of a set of political beliefs, it's a prayer book of hopes, and, finally, it's a chapbook, like those once sold by pedlars. As soon as it's in your hands, you recognize it. It's a book that innumerable people have been waiting to read. It'll be passed, I think, from hand to hand. ' (John Berger)
The French poet Francis Combes has published fifteen books of poetry, including La Fabrique du Bonheur, Cause Commune, Le Carnet Bleu de Chine and La Clef du Monde est dans l'Entrée à Gauche. He has translated several poets into French, including Heine, Brecht, Mayakovsky and Attila Joszef. He has also published two novels and, with his wife Patricia Latour, Conversation avec Henri Lefebvre. He is a founder of the radical publishing cooperative, Le Temps des Cerises, and was for many years responsible for putting poems on the Paris Metro.
Alan Dent is a poet, translator and critic. He edits the radical cultural journal Penniless Press. His anthology of contemporary French counter-cultural poetry, When the Metro is Free, is published by Smokestack.
Andras Mezei, Christmas in Auschwitz
ISBN 978-0-9560341-9-9
Price: £7.95
Between March 18 1944 and April 4 1945, half a million Hungarian Jews, Roma, homosexuals and political dissidents were transported to extermination camps, mostly in Poland and Austria. Tens of thousands were enslaved in labour camps. Almost three-quarters of Hungary's Jewish population perished. The Jewish-Hungarian poet András Mezei (1930-2008) survived the Holocaust as well as the three-month siege of Budapest. His life was inevitably shaped by these events. Throughout his long writing career, he returned repeatedly to the terrible experiences of his childhood, notably in Piled-up Time, Dual Ties, The Miracle Worker, Jewish Poems, Adorno and Treble - assembling a poetic collage of eye-witness accounts of racist mass murder. Christmas in Auschwitz brings together, for the first time in English, all of Mezei's most important poems about the Hungarian Holocaust.
‘Moving, memorable - and unrelenting. Mezei, a child of the Budapest ghetto, somehow survived the Holocaust but never came to terms with the obscenity, the unbelievable destruction of his family and community. Thomas Land has translated these poems from the Hungarian with precise dedication. They are hewn out nightmare.' (Bernard Kops, Jewish Chronicle)
‘This little known but horrible aspect of the Holocaust finds memorable testimony in András Mezei's poetry. There is nothing more important than the recuperation of this almost lost history, especially in an era when forgetting seems to be the key word.' (Daniel Weissbort)
A locksmith by trade, András Mezei was one of the most prominent writers in Communist Hungary. A poet, novelist and essayist, he wrote the script of Lucky Daniel, one of the first Hungarian films to critically examine the events of 1956. In the 1990s he launched the Belvárosi Könyvkiadó publishing house and the cultural journal Central European Times. He was a recipient of the Hungarian János Arany Prize and the Israeli Kotzetnik Prize. He died in his native Budapest in 2008.
Thomas Ország-Land is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent based in Eastern Europe. He is also a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and the 1944-45 siege of Budapest. He participated in the 1956 Hungarian Uprising as a young journalist on the staff of A Magyar Függetlenség. His many books include Tales of Matriarchy, Berlin Proposal, Prince Bluebeard's Castle (a translation of the libretto from Bartók's opera) and Deathmarch: Holocaust Poetry Translated from the Hungarian of Miklós Radnóti.
Kristin Dimitrova, My Life in Squares
ISBN 978-0-9560341-7-5
Price: £7.95
For a thousand years Bulgaria represented the border between Christian Europe, Orthodox Russia and Ottoman Islam. During the Cold War it was on the front-line between East and West. Today it represents the vivid clash of the traditional and the Modern. Bulgaria is now our near neighbour and a fellow member of the EU. A new generation of Bulgarian writers are beginning to make their voices heard on the international stage.
Kristin Dimitrova is a Balkan minimalist, a feminist-fabulist whose work combines the fantastic and the prosaic. She writes with a deceptively simple, playful, light-touch, teasing the reader with faux-folk-wisdom and unexpected, often bathetic endings. My Life in Squares is an introduction to the work of a major European poet and one of the most original writers to emerge in recent years from the ‘new Europe'. A prize-wining and widely-anthologised writer, Kristin Dimitrova's work has been published in 22 countries and translated into 19 languages. Oblique, subtle and witty, her poems creep up on her subjects from behind, demonstrating that looking at something sideways is not the same as avoiding the issue.
‘The wry humour in Kristin Dimitrova's work serves as both mask and mirror for the forthright intelligence of one who looks at the world's follies with a fierce indulgence. Highly syncopated rhythms, economy of expression, structural experimentation and play with language all accumulate in presenting her unpredictable, tragi-comic slant on the human condition.' (Linda France)
Kristin Dimitrova was born in Sofia in 1963. Her books of poetry include Jacob's Thirteenth Child (1992), A Face Under the Ice (1997), Closed Figures (1998), Faces with Twisted Tongues (1998), Talisman Repairs (2001), The People with the Lanterns (2003) and The Cardplayer's Morning (2008). She has published a book of short-stories, Love and Death under the Crooked Pear Tree (2004) and a novel Sabazuis (2007). A five-times winner of national poetry-of-the-year awards, Dimitrova has translated John Donne's poetry into Bulgarian. She teaches in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Sofia.
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